Enbridge officials grilled about pipeline plan

Burlington Post

The city hosted a public meeting last Thursday to give residents a chance to ask Enbridge staff about its Line 9B reversal proposal.

Approximately 75 people, including city staff and 10 Enbridge representatives, attended the meeting at city hall. The evening, run by an independent facilitator hired by the city, featured a 30-minute presentation by Enbridge and a two-and-a-half hour question-and-answer session.

Enbridge has asked the National Energy Board (NEB) to allow the reversal of oil from west to east in an existing 830-kilometre pipeline, known as Line 9, between Sarnia and Montreal.

The board has already approved the reversal between Sarnia and Westover station in Flamborough.

Enbridge submitted an application to do the same to the remainder of the pipeline — labelled Line 9B.

As part of the application, Enbridge is looking to increase Line 9’s capacity of oil from 240,000 to 300,000 barrels per day, as well as requesting a revision to the Line 9 rules and regulations tariff to allow transportation of heavy crude. The pipeline cuts across rural Burlington, just north of No. 1 Side Road. The length of pipeline that runs across the city is approximately seven kilometres.

Line 9B became operational in 1976. Stelco made the steel for the pipeline.

“The way we look at our pipeline is that it basically doesn’t have a lifetime — it is indefinite,” said Ken Hall, senior advisor of public affairs for Enbridge. “It is only that way because you have to take care of it. If we maintain our pipline out there, it can last for hundreds of years. We’re always in the process of renewing it – that’s the purpose of the integrity management program. For us, a pipeline that is 40 years old is not old by any means.”

Enbridge said the most recent in-line inspection of Line 9B was done in late 2012.

There were many questions asked by the crowd ranging from spill protocols and response times to leak detection and Line 9B’s track record.

Ken Woodruff, president of BurlingtonGreen, asked about the leak history of Line 9B.

“I’d like to know how you guys have been doing, specifically, have there been any reports of a leak or spills along the pipeline in the last 20 years and, if so, how many?” he said.

“There has been a number of leaks in the pipeline and one rupture event,” said Trevor Grams, Enbridge’s director of infrastructure integrity. “The rupture event was June 14, 1978. The last leak on that line was Nov. 3, 2005.”

Grams said some of the leaks were related to incidents where someone struck the pipeline with machinery.

He directed the public to view the complete history of the pipeline in the engineering assessment submitted to the National Energy Board in Table 3-2. The table shows 12 leaks and one mainline rupture between 1978-2005 from Westover station in Flamborough to Montreal since initial construction. All the leaks have been permanently repaired, according to the report.

Hall confirmed Enbridge is responsible for all cleanup costs in the event of a leak. The municipality is one of a number of government bodies contacted when there’s an incident, he added.

Hall said Enbridge staff meets annually with local emergency groups, such as the Burlington Fire Department and Halton Regional Police.

There is a specific response plan for the Eastern Ontario portion of the pipeline.

The first Enbridge staff to respond to a leak in Burlington will likely come from the Westover station in Flamborough, according to Franz Pruegger, operations supervisor, Westover region.

“The closest emergency response crew for Burlington is in Flamborough out of our facility in Westover,” Pruegger said. “…How much time would it take? We’re responding immediately, so it would all depend on the leak — where it’s at, time of day, weather and all conditions. We’re about 20 minutes to half an hour drive time from Westover to where the pipeline is in north Burlington.”

Barry Callele, director, pipeline control systems and leak detection, said a leak of two per cent of the pipeline would release approximately 14,000 litres in five minutes. The capacity of the line is 300,000 barrels per day.

Hall said pressure will not increase in the line when heavier oil products are shipped due to the addition of a dilutant product similar to gasoline being added. This gasoline-like liquid is eventually separated from the crude at a refinery and sold as a product.

The safety of the waterways the pipeline crosses was another issue raised Thursday night.

Hall said one safety measure is shutoff valves at each side of navigable waters with shipping traffic due to the increased potential for a rip.

“You mentioned navigable waters had shutoff valves on either side, what about non-navigable waters?” asked audience member Margaret Small. “There’s the escarpment, Lake Ontario — a lot of us are very concerned about the water sources around here.”

Shutoff valves are not on non-navigable waters, Hall said. He explained the pipeline wall’s width of a quarter of an inch increases to half an inch when it goes under various bodies of water.

“What we do have for all of the water crossings where we cross is we use thicker pipes through those areas and we also have an identified response plan on how to deal with an incident at all of those crossings,” Hall said. “We feel pretty comfortable that we could control incidents that could occur and we could control it within a small frame before it branched out to other water bodies.”

Questions also came on the environmental assessment submitted by Enbridge to the National Energy Board.

Margery Fowke, Enbridge’s senior counsel of regulatory affairs, said Enbridge hired third-party Canadian engineering firm Stantec to do the assessment.

Amy Schnurr, executive director of BurlingtonGreen, asked about the scope of the study that was submitted.

“Would the assessment be for the entire right-of-way?” she said.

Jeannette Gasser, Enbridge’s team lead of environmental major projects, said the environmental assessment is based on terminals and stations along the way. It is not based on the pipeline itself since there is no work being done to it, she said.

“(For) the environmental and socio-economic assessment, we did look at the entire project area, so anywhere where the project requires actual work to be performed, so this is limited to existing stations and terminals,” Gasser said.

Inquiries were made by the audience around how much diluted bitumen (dilbit) would be transported in the pipeline.

Fowke said Enbridge has contracts already in place for the reversal with refineries along the line. The contracts are for 10 years, with a five-year renewal option. Customer demand will drive what types of crude are going through the pipeline, Fowke said.

Hall said at this point, the refineries have indicated they will primarily want light crude oil.

However, if they want dilbit, it could be running through the pipeline the first day of the reversal, he added.

“The possibility of us transporting diblit would basically be relative to the customer asking us to do it,” Hall said. “If the customer asks us to do it the first day the pipline was in reverse operation, we could under the permit if it is granted. We have a predominant request from our customers for light crude at this point. How much diluted bitumen they’ll ask us to send them, we don’t know.”

Hall said Enbridge has no evidence that dilbit is more corrosive than light crude.

“Enbridge is not going to put anything into our assets that is going to potentially damage our assets — it doesn’t make sense,” Hall said. “Oil inhibits corrosion. What causes corrosion in a pipeline isn’t the type of product, it’s the water in the pipeline. That’s one of the things our integrity program is designed to detect.”

Hall said the reversal is being driven by the economy, citing Canadian refineries want Western Canadian crude, as opposed to what he says is more expensive off-shore oil.

“How can you ensure us that this will not be an export route,” asked Richard Reble, a member of Hamilton 350.

Fowke said the oil will not be shipped out of Canada. She said the reversal is not a revival of Enbridge’s controversial Trailbreaker proposal from 2008, which would use existing pipelines to ship tarsands oil from northern Alberta across Canada to Montreal, then to the United States.

“There is no (Enbridge) pipeline going out of Montreal, there is no project for a pipeline going out of Montreal and there’s not the capacity in Montreal harbour to be able to export a significant amount out of Canada,” she said. “This project is for Canadian refineries.”

Hall explained in his opening presentation Enbridge pipelines are monitored 24/7, 365 days a year from the Edmonton control centre.

He said the company learned a lot from the 2010 Enbridge pipeline spill in Marshall, Michigan, which resulted in an estimated 819,000 gallons of dilbit entering Talmadge Creek and flowing into the Kalamazoo River, a Lake Michigan tributary. He added the company has since invested tens of millions of dollars in new technologies and staff training to try to prevent it from happening again.

“It was a serious spill by anybody’s definition and we took it very hard to heart and we responded to the best of our abilities,” he said. “We have done a lot since the Marshall incident to ensure that we never have to deal with something like that again.”

Mayor Rick Goldring labelled the meeting as informative in his comments at the end of the night.

He thanked residents and environmental groups like BurlingtonGreen and the Burlington Sustainable Development Committee for their interest and strong representation.

He also credited Enbridge for answering questions, including those about the Marshall spill.

Goldring said city staff will be writing a letter to the NEB with a list of questions it has about the project.

The letter is expected to go for council approval in late February or early March.

“It is a very, very interesting issue and I think everybody realizes the city does not have jurisdiction over the approval of the reversal and this is strictly a federal issue, so we’ll be looking to the National Energy Board for their guidance,” Goldring said.

Notes from Thursday night’s question-and- answer session, as well as a video of Enbridge’s presentation, will be made available on the city’s website at www.burlington.ca in the near future, according to city staff.

For information on the Enbridge Line 9B pipeline reversal project, view the application at www.neb-one.gc.ca.

The National Energy Board process advisor for the project is Michael Benson. He can be contacted at 403-299-1992 or by e-mail at michael.benson@neb.one.gc.ca.